Ahasuerus and Haman at the Feast of Esther
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669) · 1660
Three people sit at a table in a golden darkness and nobody speaks. Queen Esther, in a heavy embroidered robe, has just told her husband, the Persian king Ahasuerus, that his minister Haman is plotting to kill her people, the Jews. The king grips his sceptre and stares. Haman, at the left, has understood that he is finished; he sinks into shadow, eyes down, his hand already loosening on the cup. The story comes from the Book of Esther in the Bible, and Rembrandt has chosen the instant between the accusation and the king's rage.
Look at the paint. Esther's robe is built up in thick ridges and lumps of gold and red, laid on with a knife as much as a brush, so that the canvas itself seems encrusted with jewels. The faces, by contrast, are soft and blurred, emerging from the dark. The three figures are placed in a triangle with light falling on the two who are innocent and shadow swallowing the guilty one. Rembrandt painted this in 1660, at the age of fifty four, bankrupt and out of fashion, and the late style on show here, with its rough surfaces and psychological silence, is the one that later generations came to prize above everything.
The painting was in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, where a poet wrote verses about it, and reached Russia in the eighteenth century. It hung in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and then in the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, and it passed to the Pushkin Museum when that museum was dissolved in 1924. It is the finest Rembrandt in Moscow and one of the greatest paintings of his final decade. Notice how small it is; the drama is entirely in the faces and hands.
Did You Know? A poem published in Amsterdam in 1662 already praised this picture, which makes it one of the few Rembrandts documented in his own lifetime.
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